'IT has no inherent value'

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Well said...

"No value is given to the knowledge of the applications and, therefore, there is no attempt to keep those persons.

I used to work for one of the major IT services companies. I read short synopsis of a few dozen of the early retirees and said "Wow, what a huge loss of application/business knowledge and expertise that will never be replaced." Most of them had a couple decades of expertise in the customer's business as well as applications. All gone out the door! No knowledge transfer, nothing. Application troubleshooting now takes multiple times longer (VALUE #1 - less downtime)

I supported the finance area of a major corporation and they rightly rotated people through positions every few months (security and audit reasons), so I (as the resident IT application expert) kinda had to retrain the new person on the business functions. (VALUE #2 - experience and knowledge of how the app works)

Here's the one that gets missed. As a SME, I could suggest/propose to the client ways to increase productivity (less $), by small enhancements. (VALUE #3)

I had on client a few years ago who spent a couple days at after month-end manually looking up information and pulling it all together to post various project costs in order to post ledger entries. After interviewing exactly what information was needed (it was all in the application files in some form) I wrote a single program to automate the entire process of information gathering/summarizing to produce the summary report needed. When the customer ran the first time in less than 5 minutes, and checked the numbers, they were ecstatic. I just saved them 2 days of time that was better spent doing other more important tasks.

I didn't see how the offshore resources supporting the various apps even understood: 1) the customer's business, 2) the applications, to be able to provide any value, especially since the our offshore support teams had ridiculously high turnover rates.

As the old saying goes, "You get what you pay for"

Posted by: dinosaur_z   Posted on: 12/03/08  (Edited: 12/03/2008 @ 10:06) You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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